"WAIT, WHAT happened?" This was the response of most students and many others last February when the administration released, seemingly out of the blue, an academic calendar with some substantial alterations. Chief among these were moving up the start of the fall semester by about a week compared to last year and a retooling of the two fall semester breaks. While student responses were generally positive (who wants to argue against getting nine days off for Thanksgiving?), this year's calendar contains several items of issue, chief among which was the administration's ad hoc manner of producing it. The University must ensure not only that this makeshift process does not repeat itself but also that the next academic calendar is a product of meaningful collaboration between the administration, faculty and students.
Last week, 345 members of the faculty delivered a petition to University President John T. Casteen, III expressing their grievances with the current calendar and their lack of input into it. Associate History Prof. Jeffrey Rossman, who created the petition, indicated by e-mail that one of the faculty's major concerns was the lost summer research time that resulted from moving up the start of classes one week. Compounding this problem was that the University announced the official change only six months in advance instead of abiding by the usual procedure of giving two years' notice.
According to a memo written by Casteen to the faculty last May, the change was made due to a steady flow of complaints from parents and students that the late end to the fall semester, which last year had exams as late as Dec. 22, was hampering students' ability to find employment for the break. Casteen also offered "help in individual [professors'] cases of academic commitments" that would be affected by the change, although University spokesperson Carol Wood said that to her knowledge no one had taken advantage of the offer.
Rossman, however, indicates that the problem has less to do with the substance of the calendar than the unilateral manner in which it was produced and made official. He says that Casteen announced the "basic shape" of the new calendar at a Feb. 9 Faculty Senate meeting but provided few details, and less than two weeks later the final calendar was released for distribution. In the past, a Calendar Committee with representatives from the administration, faculty and student body has produced calendars about two years in advance, although the practice has lapsed in recent years. While Rossman credits the administration for recently reinstating the committee, he says that it was "reestablished only after an executive decision was made to substantially restructure the fall schedule," and thus had little substantive role to play. Wood indicated that instead there was "consultation with Student Council and Faculty Senate leadership," although the extent of this discussion seems to have had a limited effect on the major substance of the changes. Minimal efforts were made to invite comments or criticisms from the community as a whole.
Faculty and students initially caught off guard by the new calendar have already experienced a number of problems with it. As indicated by Rossman's petition, many professors are not pleased by the loss of a week of summer research and writing time. In a similar vein, Rossman pointed out that some students have had difficulty finding summer jobs or internships that allow them to return to school in mid-August, a fact that is especially troubling to those students of modest means who rely much more highly on income earned during the summer months than on temporary winter positions.
Additionally, the reduction of the reading days to a three-day weekend made going home entirely impractical for out-of-state students who would have had to spend most of the break en-route, keeping many of them here until Thanksgiving. While none of these dilemmas are causing panic in the streets, they nonetheless reflect a lack of faculty and student input uncharacteristic to an institution usually so renowned for its procedures of self-government.
By reconstituting the Calendar Committee, the administration has taken an important step towards rectifying the situation. The faculty is well represented by the deans of the College, Education and Nursing schools plus a representative of the faculty Senate, and two students -- one graduate and an undergraduate -- serve as the voices of the student body. However, those voices will have little to say unless we, the members of the student body, do not publicly express our opinions and concerns about the calendar. Similarly, the professors cannot consider the delivery of last week's petition the end of their task. The Calendar Committee will begin meeting next month, and faculty and students must not only watch its activities but publicly generate debate on the issue by means of letters to the editor, public displays, etc. An issue so far-reaching as the calendar that frames our academic lives here at the University should not be decided behind closed doors, but it will ultimately be our task to see that those doors stay pried open.
A.J. Kornblith's column runs on Mondays in the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at akornblith@cavalierdaily.com.
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